Comparisons
AWS Config vs. CloudQuery
This blog post provides a comprehensive analysis of AWS Config vs CloudQuery. It breaks down the features, pricing, and use cases to help you decide which tool is right for your team.
What is CloudQuery? #
CloudQuery is a complete cloud governance solution enabling smarter cloud audits, better cloud asset inventories, and more responsive targeted security monitoring. It is an open-source core platform that companies use to power their cloud asset inventories, security compliance, cloud cost management solutions, or solve any other data movement problem.
CloudQuery offers a growing list of supported Source and Destination plugins, making getting started easy. If you need to connect to a data source or destination that doesn’t already have a plugin, CloudQuery’s open-source plugin system makes building your connectors in any language easy using our Apache Arrow-powered SDK. Out-of-the-box rate-limiting, scheduling, and more are offered, backed up by robust documentation and an active community of developers and users.
Key Features of CloudQuery #
Here are some of the key features of CloudQuery:
- Massive and growing plugin library: The CloudQuery team develops and maintains plugins, which are regularly updated to ensure excellent performance and reliability.
- Multi-Cloud Support: Query and analyze cloud assets across AWS, GCP, Azure, and more.
- Reduce Costs: You can reduce costs compared to AWS Config by enabling efficient, customizable asset inventory and compliance checks without incurring ongoing AWS service charges.
- Sync your Cloud Data Anywhere: With CloudQuery, you can export and keep your cloud resource data anywhere. You can enrich this data with data from your data warehouse, use it for historical analysis, or build custom solutions.
- All your cloud data in one place: AWS Config splits up your data by account, which makes it difficult to get a holistic view of your resources. CloudQuery makes it easy to move all your data into one place for analysis.
- Compliance & Security: Build a solution to automate your audits, monitor changes, and ensure compliance with custom policies.
- Cost Management: CloudQuery can help optimize your cloud spend by identifying underutilized resources.
- Customizable & extensible: Leverage a rich and growing plugin ecosystem or build your own using an flexible plugin architecture in Go, Python, Java, or JavaScript.
- Developer-First CLI: Interact directly with your cloud assets using our powerful, developer-friendly command-line interface, designed for speed, flexibility, and ease of use in complex workflows.
- Fast and portable: CloudQuery runs as a single binary executable, making it easy to deploy and run anywhere, even in your DevOps workflow.
What is AWS Config? #
AWS Config is a configuration management system by AWS that helps organizations build and maintain a holistic view of their AWS resources. This view allows businesses to monitor all their AWS resources and ensure that their setup remains robust and secure in compliance with their legal obligations.
AWS Config helps uphold this by regularly recording and maintaining the timeline of changes in your AWS resource configurations. Cloud architects can use this information to track resource dependencies and changes over time. Once you have detailed insights into your AWS resources and their configuration, you can focus on identifying and mitigating potential risks while complying with the industry standards and policies.
Key Features of AWS Config #
The primary key benefits and features of AWS Config include:
- Self-Correct Configurations: AWS Config supports fixing issues with your AWS infrastructure by automatically correcting non-compliant AWS resource configurations based on predefined rules, reducing the need for manual intervention. However, this feature only works for AWS accounts.
- Minimal Maintenance: AWS Config can automatically be enabled in all accounts and regions. Supports tracking new resources with no downtime.
- AWS Resource Configuration Tracking: Tracking configurations of AWS resources such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, security groups, and VPCs.
- Historical Configuration Management: Maintaining a record of historical configurations and relationships allows you to see changes over time.
- AWS Service Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other AWS services for enhanced monitoring and compliance.
- Continuous Compliance Evaluation: Continuously evaluates resource configurations against best practices and internal policies.
Technical Comparison: AWS Config vs. CloudQuery #
| Feature | CloudQuery | AWS Config |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | High, optimized with Go concurrency | High, with AWS infrastructure support |
| Price | Premium plugins are charged for every 1 million rows of data synced. | Pricing is based on the number of configuration items recorded, evaluations against the rules, and active rules per region. |
| Deployment | Anywhere, single-binary executables | AWS ecosystem |
| Open Source | Yes, with closed source premium plugins | No |
| Connector Quality | High-quality connectors with regular updates; supports multiple cloud providers | High-quality connectors but limited to AWS resources |
| Custom Source or Destination Development | Any Language (Golang, Python, JavaScript, Java). More coming | Not directly supported; primarily focused on AWS resources |
| Multi-Cloud | Supports all major cloud providers | AWS only |
| Pre-built Policies | Yes | Yes |
| Scalability | High | High, within AWS ecosystem |
| Integration | Supports all major orchestrators | Deep integration with AWS services |
| Hosting | Self hosted or cloud hosted | Cloud hosted only |
| Embeddable | It runs as a single binary, which can even be embedded in your DevOps workflows. | No. |
Use Cases #
Here’s a detailed look at CloudQuery and AWS Config's capabilities and use cases, each in its ideal context.
CloudQuery Use Cases #
1. Aggregate all your data in one place:
CloudQuery solves this by allowing you to aggregate and query configuration data across all your AWS accounts in a single, centralized database. It can even sync your accounts from all major cloud vendors. This allows for comprehensive cross-account analysis, streamlining governance and security efforts within AWS environments. AWS Config’s limitation of not providing unified visibility across all accounts can lead to fragmented compliance monitoring and analysis.
2. Self-Hosting for Security-Sensitive Data:
CloudQuery allows organizations to self-host CloudQuery and sync your data into any data store for processing. This is especially crucial for handling sensitive data following strict security regulations. They maintain data security control and comply with GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS standards.
3. Query your data in any language:
With CloudQuery, you can leverage your existing SQL skills to query your cloud data directly, which makes it easier and faster to get the answers you need. Familiarity with SQL empowers you to perform complex analyses without learning new tools or languages. By syncing your data to a data store you already know, CloudQuery simplifies data exploration, enabling more efficient decision-making and problem-solving.
4. Reduce Cloud Costs:
CloudQuery allows organizations to perform comprehensive cloud resource analysis by aggregating data from multiple cloud providers into a single, queryable database. By analyzing this data, teams can identify underutilized resources, optimize resource allocation, and eliminate unnecessary costs. This visibility across the entire cloud infrastructure empowers businesses to make informed decisions, leading to significant cost savings and more efficient cloud spending.
5. Comprehensive AWS Resource Support:
At the time of this writing, AWS Config supports 93 different services and 418 unique resources, while CloudQuery supports 133 different AWS services and provides access to 576 distinct tables from your AWS data.
6. Save Money:
CloudQuery offers a more predictable pricing model based on infrastructure usage, which is particularly beneficial for large-scale or multi-cloud environments. This flexibility allows you to optimize spending while maintaining robust cloud asset management. Unlike AWS Config, which charges based on the number of configuration items recorded and rule evaluations, leading to potential cost increases as your environment scales. Learn more about AWS Config’s costs in our post, Understanding AWS Config Cost.
7. Database Migrations:
CloudQuery can streamline database migrations by providing a detailed, queryable inventory of all database assets across cloud environments. By using SQL queries, teams can quickly identify and assess dependencies, configurations, and usage patterns, ensuring a smoother transition with minimal disruption. This visibility helps plan and execute migrations efficiently, reducing risks associated with unforeseen issues.
8. Multi-Cloud Integration:
CloudQuery integrates and synchronizes data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or hybrid setups. This enables cloud architects to manage configuration data from multiple sources and focus on optimizing allocation for this data. You can enforce their data management policies consistently across multiple cloud environments.
AWS Config Use Cases #
1. Managed Services for Easy Setup:
AWS Config simplifies resource configuration management. It is a managed service, so users can quickly deploy it without extensive setup and maintenance issues.
2. Low maintenance
AWS Config allows you to automatically correct non-compliant AWS resource configurations based on predefined rules, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention. This capability is handy for maintaining compliance across large AWS environments, ensuring that deviations from compliance standards are swiftly corrected without manual oversight. However, it’s important to note that this functionality is limited to AWS accounts, which may require additional tools or solutions for multi-cloud environments or external resources.
3. Easy to scale
AWS Config offers seamless scalability, enabling you to monitor and manage configurations across numerous AWS resources, accounts, and regions with ease. AWS handles all the scaling automatically, so you don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This makes it simple for organizations to expand their compliance and governance efforts without the hassle of managing scalability themselves.
4. Compliant Data Transforms
AWS Config provides guaranteed compliance transformations directly from AWS, ensuring that resource configurations meet predefined standards with minimal manual intervention. This makes it ideal for organizations that require assured compliance across their AWS environments. However, this requires SecurityHub and Audit Manager to achieve regulatory compliance on top of AWS.
CloudQuery, on the other hand, offers highly flexible customizable transformations that can be tailored to specific security needs across multiple clouds. However, these transformations require manual checks to ensure they align with compliance requirements, offering more control but necessitating ongoing management.
Final Verdict: AWS Config vs CloudQuery #
When choosing between AWS Config and CloudQuery, your organization's specific needs must be considered, especially regarding compliance, scalability, and multi-cloud support.
AWS Config excels in providing a fully managed, scalable solution for organizations that are deeply integrated into the AWS ecosystem. It’s ideal for ensuring regulatory compliance within AWS, offering features like self-correcting misconfigured policies and seamless scaling, all managed by AWS. However, comprehensive compliance requires additional services like SecurityHub and Audit Manager.
On the other hand, CloudQuery shines as a versatile ELT solution that enables customers to take complete control of their cloud data across multiple providers. It empowers teams to build in-house custom compliance tooling or entire solutions, with the flexibility to optimize costs and leverage familiar tools like SQL. While it requires more hands-on management, CloudQuery’s flexibility and multi-cloud support make it a powerful choice for organizations seeking a customizable, cost-effective approach to cloud asset management.
Both tools have their strengths, and understanding your specific requirements will guide you to the best fit for your cloud management strategy.
To experience the benefits of data and configuration management yourself, try CloudQuery at no cost and see how it can streamline your cloud data integration processes.
If you want to learn more or need assistance, schedule a call with our team to discuss how CloudQuery can meet your specific needs.
Written by Joe Karlsson
Joe Karlsson (He/They) is an Engineer turned Developer Advocate (and massive nerd). Joe empowers developers to think creatively when building applications, through demos, blogs, videos, or whatever else developers need.
